First Full Day

It's midnight and the glass coach is still glittering downstairs. We have arrived at the ball and for the next two weeks, we don't have a curfew!

We learned a lot from today. We each surpassed our writing goals, although we occasionally forgot to eat and regularly forgot to drink. (We have a new system to address that which includes refiling our glasses every time one of us gets up to do something. Fortunately, the tap water in this pristine mountain town is cold and fresh.) After ten plus hours at the computer with a short break for lunch (only because the pregnant lady was hungry), we finally took our daily constitutional, but waited until the restaurants were close to closing for the night. Not yet having eaten dinner, we had to cut it short and didn't make our goal of an hour and a half. Better than nothing, though.

Letterlady arrived with some incredible number of chapters (27?) of her novel already drafted in some form or another. Today she edited five and I read through and made notes on the first three. Suffice it to say that she's as smart on paper as she is in person. She weaves mathematics, probability, statistics, philosophy, physics, paranoia and coincidence into a book that stretches your brain and leaves you hanging off a cliff at the end of every chapter. What's more, she uses footnotes on every page as a device through which we can hear more of the narrator's inner monologue. It's one of my favorite things about the book so far. I am awed and humbled by the complicated brilliance of her work, and honored that she thinks I'm smart enough to actually be of use.

As crazy as it sounds, being cooped up with such witty and charming company, doing nothing all day but write fiction is easily the most fun I've had in years (with the possible exception of reading with my daughter every night before bed.) I'm not kidding. I mean YEARS.

Hallelujah. Long Live the Fund for Teachers!